Ideology in the vision theater

Thanks to Kenneth Olwig for suggesting that ideology may be related to the argument from the post On the exterior homunculus fallacy . More precisely, Olwig points to the following quote from The German Ideology by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels:

If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process. In direct contrast to German philosophy which descends from heaven to earth, here we ascend from earth to heaven. That is to say, we do not set out from what men say, imagine, conceive, nor from men as narrated, thought of, imagined, conceived, in order to arrive at men in the flesh. We set out from real, active men, and on the basis of their real life-process we demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life-process. The phantoms formed in the human brain are also, necessarily, sublimates of their material life-process, which is empirically verifiable and bound to material premises.

With any homunculus, I argue, comes also a scenic space, which has to be taken into account in any theory of mind, because it is as artificial, it leads to the same kind of fallacy as the homunculus. In the posts Towards aerography, or how space is shaped to comply with the perceptions of the homunculus and Theatron as an eye I further develop the subject by trying to see what becomes the homunculus fallacy if we use not the theater in a box, but the old greek theater instead (and apparently it seems that it stops to be a fallacy, as homunculi and designed scenic spaces melt into oblivion and the gnomon, the generator of self-similarity, comes to the attention). Finally, in the post On the exterior homunculus fallacy I argue that the original homunculus fallacy is not depending on the fact that the homunculus is inside or outside the brain, thus leading me to suppose that the neuroscientist which studies a fly’s vision system is an exterior homunculus with respect to the fly and the lab is the scenic space of this homunculus. It means that any explanation of the fly vision which makes use of arguments which are not physically embedded in the fly brain (like knowledge about the euclidean structure of the space) makes sense for the experimenter, but cannot be the real explanations, because the fly does not have a lab with a small homunculus inside the head.

Which brings me to the relation with ideology, which is more than a given point of view, is a theater in a box which invites the infected host to take the place of the homunculus, watch the show and make an opinion based on the privileged position it occupies. But the opinion can be only one, carefully designed by the author of the ideology, the scenographer. The scenic space needs an Inigo Jones, Inigo Jones is the ignored dual of the homunculus-king. He does not use magic in order to organize the show for the king, but he adds meaning. In the case of an ideology (a word which has as root a greek word meaning “to see”, thanks again to Olwig for this) the added meaning is intentional, but in the case of a neuroscientist which experiments on the vision system of a fly (what a king) it is unintended, but still present, under the form of assumptions which lead the experimenter to an explanation of the fly vision which is different from what the fly does when seeing (likely an evolving graph with neurons as nodes and synapses as edges, which modifies itself according to the input, without any exterior knowledge about the experimenter’s lab and techniques).